News behind the news. This picture is me (white spot) standing on the bridge connecting European and North American tectonic plates. It is located in the Reykjanes area of Iceland. By-the-way, this is a color picture.

Tag Archives: NATO

Bloomberg posted an article yesterday about the results of the referendum in Turkey. The results of the election are not good news for freedom-loving people in Turkey or in the Middle East.

The article reports:

Turkey voted to hand Recep Tayyip Erdogan sweeping authority in the most radical overhaul since the republic was founded 93 years ago on the expectation he’ll safeguard security amid regional wars and kickstart the economy.

The referendum won approval of 51.3 percent to 48.7 percent of Turks, according to the state-run Anadolu news agency, as opposition parties alleged fraud and the European Union branded it as unfair. Once implemented, Erdogan will have authority to appoint ministers and top judges at his discretion and call elections at any time. It will also give him much greater sway over fiscal policy and may deepen investors’ concerns about the independence of the central bank.

The win “represents a blow to the assumption that liberal or even in some cases hybrid democracies are structured to prevent authoritarian figures from hijacking the political system,” Anthony Skinner, a director with U.K.-based forecasting company Verisk Maplecroft, said before the results were declared.

Erdogan triumphed by appealing to voters in the small towns that dot the Anatolian heartland where he won overwhelmingly. These Turks want a firm hand at the helm to combat the resurgence of terrorism, fight Kurdish separatism and Islamic State in Syria and defend Turkey’s global interests. The result is a victory not only for him, but for type of authoritarian system exemplified by Vladimir Putin that has gained admirers around the world.

It helps when looking at this situation to look at some of the history of Turkey and some of its current friends. Turkey is a member of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) as well as a member of NATO. The OIC describes itself as “the collective voice of the Muslim world” and works to “safeguard and protect the interests of the Muslim world in the spirit of promoting international peace and harmony.” It’s important to note here that the definition of peace under Sharia Law is the subjugation of all countries and people of the world to Sharia Law. This is not a group that favors democracy.

Historically, Turkey was the heart of the Ottoman Empire, which was defeated in World War I. In 1924, Ataturk (Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Republic of Turkey, serving as its first President from 1923 until his death in 1938) enacted a new constitution in Turkey. The new constitution instituted laws and jurisprudence much like European laws. There was also a thorough secularization of modernization of the administration. The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the secularization of Turkey caused Hassan al Banna to found the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928 with the purpose of unifying the Islamic states under a new caliphate.

We need to remember that the Ottoman Empire was dissolved less than one hundred years ago. There are still many Muslims who want to bring back the caliphate. I suspect that in addition to his desire to obtain more power and more control, Recep Tayyip Erdogan may well be moving in the direction he feels will bring back the caliphate.

Before we follow the money, lets look at some history. During World War II, the British limited immigration to Israel because they did not want to antagonize the Arabs. It wasn’t that the British loved the Arabs–the Arabs had the oil Britain needed. In 1960 the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting CountriesilOPEC) was formed in Baghdad, Iraq. The mandate of OPEC is to “coordinate and unify the petroleum policies” of its members and to “ensure the stabilization of oil markets in order to secure an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consumers, a steady income to producers and a fair return on capital for those investing in the petroleum industry.” (Essentially, they formed a monopoly whichthey stated would benefit producers and consumers.) We saw how well this worked when they tripled the price of oil in the 1970’s. We have also seen oil used as a political weapon to discourage international support of Israel. Now OPEC has a problem. If America becomes energy independent, OPEC has lost its political clout, and the repressive regimes in the Middle East that control OPEC might lose a lot of their support from western nations. What better way to discourage energy independence in America than to support the groups that oppose fracking and other petroleum industries.

The article reports:

A shadowy Bermudan company that has funneled tens of millions of dollars to anti-fracking environmentalist groups in the United States is run by executives with deep ties to Russian oil interests and offshore money laundering schemes involving members of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.

One of those executives, Nicholas Hoskins, is a director at a hedge fund management firm that has invested heavily in Russian oil and gas. He is also senior counsel at the Bermudan law firm Wakefield Quin and the vice president of a London-based investment firm whose president until recently chaired the board of the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft.

In addition to those roles, Hoskins is a director at a company called Klein Ltd. No one knows where that firm’s money comes from. Its only publicly documented activities have been transfers of $23 million to U.S. environmentalist groups that push policies that would hamstring surging American oil and gas production, which has hurt Russia’s energy-reliant economy.

Russia needs high energy prices to support its economy. Fracking is a threat to those prices.

The article concludes:

“I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organizations—environmental organizations working against shale gas—to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, formerly NATO’s secretary general, said last year.

“If anybody in Russia is behind all the secretive Bermuda investment house and law firm action, it’s most likely some oligarch bidding against U.S. competition,” he said in an email.

Arnold, the author of Undue Influence: Wealthy Foundations, Grant Driven Environmental Groups, and Zealous Bureaucrats That Control Your Future, said that the opacity of Klein Ltd.’s involvement with the Sea Change Foundation exemplifies attempts to shield the source of donations to such groups.

“In my experience of trying to penetrate offshore money funnels for U.S. leftist foundations and green groups, I have found that Liechtenstein, Panama and Bermuda are the Big Three green equivalents of the Cayman Islands for hedge fund managers—totally opaque and impervious to my specially designed research tools,” Arnold said.

The Russians are not the first to play this game. In September 2012, Power Line reported:

Earlier today, Steve gave this week’s Green Weenie award to Matt Damon for the anti-fracking movie Promised Land, which, it turns out, was financed by the United Arab Emirates. Who, trust me, acted out of a noble concern for the environment and had no thought of suppressing American fossil fuel development which would compete with the Emirates’ product and likely cost the Emirates billions of dollars.

Before you buy into the latest environmental (or other) cause, find out who is funding it.

First of all, I would like to remind everyone that Russia has paid no price for taking over the Crimea–there is no one standing up for the rights of the people in the Ukraine to expel the Russians from the Crimea and re-unite their country. The Russian takeover of the Crimea is considered part of the current baseline, and no one is talking about it as if it were the problem it is.

The article reports:

Regarding the nuclear deployments to Crimea, Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member James Inhofe (R., Okla.) first disclosed last month that Putin had announced in August his approval of deploying nuclear-capable Iskander-M short-range missiles along with Tu-22 nuclear-capable bombers in Crimea, located on the Black Sea.

“The stationing of new nuclear forces on the Crimean peninsula, Ukrainian territory Russia annexed in March, is both a new and menacing threat to the security of Europe and also a clear message from Putin that he intends to continue to violate the territorial integrity of his neighbors,” Inhofe stated in a Sept. 8 op-ed in Foreign Policy.

In their Sept. 23 letter to the president, McKeon, Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Ala.), chairman of the subcommittee on strategic forces, and Rep. Michael Turner (R., Ohio), chairman of the subcommittee on tactical air and land forces, noted Russia’s violation of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty by building a banned cruise missile. The missile has been identified by U.S. officials as the R-500.

The lawmakers said the Russian nuclear deployment in Crimea represents the “clear, and perhaps irrevocable tearing” of the 1997 agreement between NATO and Russia that allowed Russia to maintain a military presence within the alliance.

This is another example of America’s lack of strength making the world less safe–not safer. We need to increase our defense spending to make sure we have the weapons in place if Russia decides to go after a country in Europe next.

The American Thinker posted an article today about President Obama’s latest assurances that NATO would protect the Baltic states. The President has a habit of drawing red lines and then stepping over them. Unfortunately, we have passed the point where the rest of the world takes him seriously.

The article reminds us that as soon as President Obama drew his red line in Syria, Putin made a move that left Russia as the dominant player in Syria. Now Putin is reacting to President Obama’s statement that NATO would protect the Baltic republics.

The apparent abduction and detention of an Estonian security officer raised tensions between Estonia and Russia just two days after President Barack Obama came to the country and vowed to defend it as a NATO member.

Estonia’s Internal Security Service, known as KAPO, said its officer Eston Kohver was “illegally detained” at gunpoint early Friday while on duty in southeastern Estonia. It said his abductors had come from Russia and had jammed radio communications and used a smoke grenade in the incident.

“It is unacceptable that people who have crossed the Estonian border kidnap an Estonian citizen from Estonian territory,” President Toomas Hendrik Ilves tweeted on Friday. “I expect the case to be solved quickly.”

The article at America Thinker concludes:

We are in very dangerous territory now. Russia will be encouraged to escalate its provocations, having seen that Obama’s threats are empty. Putin as already mentioned that Russia is a nuclear power, a not so veiled threat to start World War Three should his future aggression meet a response. The risk is that having shown he can be bullied, Obama will respond too late and too strongly, thereby setting off Armageddon.

Weakness is provocative. Obama believes the opposite, and he is as wrong as Neville Chamberlain was.

There was no real cost to Russia for taking over the Crimean region of Ukraine, so Russia has decided to see exactly how far it can go. There are three stories linked on the Drudge Report right now that are merely a taste of things to come.

The 2014 mid-term election is rapidly approaching. We can’t change the White House, but we can change Congress. Unfortunately we have two more years of President Obama in the White House. One of the consequences of that fact is the decline of respect for America around the world.

Military.com posted an article yesterday that illustrates how far America has fallen during the Obama Administration.

The article reports:

A Russian Su-24 fighter jet made multiple low-level passes close to a U.S. destroyer in the Black Sea in the latest “provocation” by Moscow related to the crisis in Ukraine, Pentagon and White House officials said Monday.

The article further reports that the destroyer did not go to battle stations. Why not?

The article further reports:

Carney also said that President Obama was expected to phone Russian President Vladimir Putin to protest the Cook incident and warn of tougher economic sanctions if Russia fails to pull back the estimated 40,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders.

Carney stressed that the faceoff with Russia was not intended to start a new Cold War but “we have profound differences with Russia, and we confront those differences directly.”

“I can assure you that Russia’s provocations and further transgressions will come with a cost,” Carney said, referring to economic sanctions that are being discussed with the European Union.

“Certainly if they go further down the road in attempting to destabilize Ukraine the costs will continue to grow,” Carney said.

I think Russia has already figured out that President Obama’s red lines are drawn with invisible ink. We need someone in the White House who will honor the treaty obligations we made with Ukraine and make sure we honor our treaty obligations with NATO, because President Putin will be testing those shortly.

The BBC posted an article today confirming that the Syrian military had shot down a Turkish F-4 Phantom jet that Syria claimed had strayed into Syrian airspace over Syrian waters.

The article reports:

A spokesman said the plane, an F-4 Phantom, was dealt with “according to the laws that govern such situations”, the state news agency Sana said.

The Turkish prime minister said his country would “take the necessary steps” once all the facts were known.

Meanwhile, the violence in Syria continues and escalates.

I have no answers for Syria–some of the people rebelling are as bad if not worse than the people in charge. We need to make some effort to protect the innocent civilian population, but I am not convinced that we should want to help arm the rebels or support them in any way.

The little news analysis block next to the news story stated:

The tone of the Syrian statement was strictly factual, and there was no expression of regret. If the plane did indeed violate Syrian airspace, that, and the apparent ease with which it was shot down, will be a considerable embarrassment to the Turkish government.

Hezbollah‘s TV station in Lebanon, al-Manar, which was among the first to report the incident, described it as “a clear message to Nato” about the perils of outside military intervention in the Syrian crisis.

I have no idea what it will take to bring peace and stability to Syria. I just hope that there is someone with some degree of power who does.

Fox News is reporting today that Dr Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani doctor who helped the United States in the raid on Osama Bin Laden has been sentenced to 33 years in prison on Wednesday for conspiring against the state.

The article reports:

Shakil Afridi ran a vaccination program for the CIA to collect DNA and verify bin Laden’s presence at the compound in the town of Abbottabad where U.S. commandos killed the Al Qaeda chief last May in a unilateral raid. The operation outraged Pakistani officials, who portrayed it as an act of treachery by a supposed ally.

Wait a minute. Hasn’t the President been claiming all along that we were never sure that Osama Bin Laden was actually in the compound?

The article at Fox News reminds us:

On Tuesday, a Senate panel approved a foreign aid budget for next year that slashes U.S. assistance to Pakistan by more than half and threatens further reductions if it fails to open the NATO supply routes.

American lawmakers are also frustrated by suspicions that Pakistan is aiding militants who use its territory to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan — allegations Islamabad has rejected. There is also lingering resentment over the fact that bin Laden was found hiding deep inside Pakistan.

But the U.S. cannot afford to turn its back on Pakistan entirely.

Pakistan is seen as vital to negotiating a peace deal with the Afghan Taliban and their allies given the country’s historical ties with the militants.

The Pakistani government is also keen to repair relations with the U.S., partly to receive over a billion dollars in American aid it needs to fill out its budget as it looks ahead to national elections scheduled for 2013. But patching up ties is politically sensitive in a country where anti-American sentiment is rampant.

Aside from the obvious questions surrounding the arrest of Dr. Afridi, why in the world are giving major amounts of money to a country that obviously does not support us? Also, why in the world are we negotiating a peace deal with the Taliban rather than defeating them?

Today’s Washington Times posted a story about the current situation regarding the NATO missile defense sites in Eastern Europe that are supposed to be set up. These sites are supposed to be the subject of the recent open microphone remark by President Obama to Russian President Medvedev that President Obama would be able to be much more flexible in his second term. Well, evidently President Obama’s promise of flexibility in the future didn’t really impress the Russians.

The article in the Washington Times reports:

Russia’s most senior military officer (Russian Chief of General Staff Nikolai Makarov) said Thursday that Moscow would strike and destroy NATO missile defense sites in Eastern Europe before they came online if the U.S. pushes ahead with deployment.

“A decision to use destructive force pre-emptively will be taken if the situation worsens,” Russian Chief of General Staff Nikolai Makarov said at an international missile defense conference in Moscow attended by senior U.S. and NATO officials.

How did America get to a place where we are being overtly threatened by the Russians?

The article concludes:

Russian officials insist that the system has the capability to shoot down their ICBMs, thus robbing their nuclear deterrent of its credibility and destabilizing the Cold War-era balance of mutually assured destruction.

Neither the State Department nor the Pentagon had any immediate comment on the Russian threat Thursday.

I need to point out here that the missile defense system in question is a missile defense system–no one is saying anything about offensive weapons (except the Russians). How did we get to a place where the Russians can tell us whether or not we can place defensive missiles in Europe?

The canary in the coal mine is in trouble. When bad things happen to the Jews or to Israel, shortly afterward, bad things begin to happen to the rest of us.

Breitbart.com is reporting today that Turkey has blocked Israel from attending a NATO summit to be held in Chicago in May. The Turks claim that the move was made in retaliation for the refusal of Israel to formally apologize for its attack on the Mavi Marmara.

The article reports:

The Obama Administration, whose fearless leader just assured Jews of his support for Israel at the Holocaust Museum, was noncommittal in its response when queried whether they would openly state to NATO that they wanted Israel to participate. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland was evasive when she was confronted:

Q: Well, would you be — would the United [States] — would the administration be comfortable if Israel did not participate?

MS. NULAND: Again, we — there are many, many ways that these partnership activities may go forward. They’ve been done in different ways at different summits. So I’m not going to get into what we’re talking about, how it might work, who’s going to come. We’re still working on all of that.

Q: You — the administration won’t come out and say that it wants Israel to be at the — to participate at the — at the — at the summit in Chicago?

MS. NULAND: We haven’t made any announcements …

Q: … If you can’t come out and say that the United States wants Israel to participate, its main ally in the Middle East, and you won’t come out and say that the administration wants them to participate in whatever event is going on in Chicago, that’s — that is going to be seized on …

MS. NULAND: So every summit is done on a case-by-case basis, and we haven’t made a decision about who’s going to be invited yet …

Q: … But the Turks wouldn’t be objecting to Israel’s participation, if someone hadn’t proposed that Israel participate. And if you have proposed that they participate —

MS. NULAND: Again —

Q: — and you’re not willing to stick up for it, I don’t understand why —

MS. NULAND: I’m not going to get into, here, what we have proposed and where we are in the internal dialogue at NATO until the issues are settled by consensus.

So Turkey, whose government is now run by Islamists and whose leader is ostensibly Obama’s friend, is dictating policy to the United States. And as usual, Obama is only too willing to throw Israel under the bus.

This is the link to the YouTube video of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talking about the death of Libyan leader Muammar Al-Qaddafi. I understand that it is possible to be happy about the death of a tyrant, but her statement is totally out of bounds. She could have commented on Qaddafi’s death in a much more graceful way.

Andrew McCarthy (a senior fellow at the National Review Institute) posted an article at National Review Online today with his comments on the death of Gaddafi. Mr. McCarthy was the Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York who prosecuted the ‘Blind Sheik’ after the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. In prosecuting that case, Mr. McCarthy studied the Koran and the Islamist culture in order to get a better picture of the root causes of the attack. In National Review Online, he reminds us that the removal of Qaddafi as the ruler of Libya may not have the result America is looking for.

Mr. McCarthy reminds us that the Arab Spring has some ugly aspects:

The most obviously ugly of these is that a throng of seething Islamists stripped, beat, paraded, and finally shot Qaddafi execution-style, all the while screaming the signature “Allahu Akbar!” battle cry with a fervor that would have made Mohamed Atta blush. They then shoved the despot’s corpse into a refrigerator — to maintain it for further triumphant display before thousands of gawking spectators. Too bad there was no official from the Obama administration’s Islamic Thought Police on hand to remind the mob of the Koran’s oft-quoted (but oftener ignored) teaching that to slay a single person is to slay all of mankind.

Mr. McCarthy concludes:

Qaddafi’s escape from his last holdout was thus cut off by NATO airstrikes. Trapped and hidden in a sewer, he was dragged out and brutalized — not for intelligence, but for sport. There is video here if you can stomach it. What NATO abetted was not a military capture. It was an assassination. We will be worse off that it happened. And the way it happened should sicken us.

No one will argue that Qaddafi was a brutal dictator. However, in recent years he had greatly limited his terrorist activities and was no longer a threat to the west. As the new government immediately declared Sharia Law when they took over Libya, it is a pretty safe bet that they will be a threat to the west. Terrorism from Libya may again become an everyday thing. The way Qaddafi died is upsetting. Secretary of State Clinton’s comments on Qaddafi’s death are even more upsetting. I think we have backed the wrong people in the Arab Spring. The only way that freedom and democracy will come the the Middle East and North Africa is the have a revolution in Iran. That was the revolution we refused to support after the last fixed election. The Obama administration seems to have a definite gift for backing the wrong horse.

A website called Klein Online posted an article on October 15th about some of the reasons for America’s involvement in Uganda.

The article reports:

An influential “crisis management organization” that boasts billionaire George Soros as a member of its executive board recently recommended the U.S. deploy a special advisory military team to Uganda to help with operations and run an intelligence platform.

The president-emeritus of that organization, the International Crisis Group, is the principal author of Responsibility to Protect, the military doctrine used by Obama to justify the U.S.-led NATO campaign in Libya.

Soros’ own Open Society Institute is one of only three nongovernmental funders of the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect, a doctrine that has been cited many times by activists urging intervention in Uganda.

As we prepare to leave Iraq to Iran and prepare to leave Afghanistan to the Taliban, we are protecting the financial interests of George Soros, a man who has stated that he has no love for America.

Max Fisher recently wrote in The Atlantic that he could not see how the Lord’s Resistance Army was a threat to America.

The article at Klein Online further reports:

Also in 2008, the Africa Institute for Energy Governance, a grantee of the Soros-funded Revenue Watch, helped established the Publish What You Pay Coalition of Uganda, or PWYP, which was purportedly launched to coordinate and streamline the efforts of the government in promoting transparency and accountability in the oil sector.

Also, a steering committee was formed for PWYP Uganda to develop an agenda for implementing the oil advocacy initiatives and a constitution to guide PWYP’s oil work.

PWYP has since 2006 hosted a number of training workshops in Uganda purportedly to promote contract transparency in Uganda’s oil sector.

PWYP is directly funded by Soros’ Open Society as well as the Soros-funded Revenue Watch Institute. PWYP international is actually hosted by the Open Society Foundation in London.

The billionaire’s Open Society Institute, meanwhile, runs numerous offices in Uganda. It maintains a country manager in Uganda, as well as the Open Society Initiative for East Africa, which supports work in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.

A stable society in Uganda is a good thing for everyone. However, it is a particularly good thing for George Soros. It’s nice that the United States military is willing to protect the finances of a man who is attempting to use those finances to destroy the United States.